
Earth Hour
Earth Hour premiered its official video for 2013, with David Guetta’s Without You featuring Usher revealed as the highly anticipated soundtrack for the world’s largest campaign for the planet.
An energetic showcase of the best crowd-sourced footage from this year’s global lights off celebration, the video also introduces Earth Hour’s theme for the next three years, "I Will If You Will"—taking the passion of Earth Hour, beyond the hour.
Earth Hour 2012 embraced 7,001 cities and towns in 152 countries and territories, with hundreds of millions of people participating across all seven continents.
Created by Sydney-based award-winning design firm, Resolution™, the video displays a glimpse of the thousands of viral “I Will If You Will” challenges created in 2012, from international supermodel Miranda Kerr’s yoga challenge, all the way to a student organized high school flash mob challenge in Korea.
The video begins and ends with awe-inspiring images of our world from above, celebrating Earth Hour reaching the International Space Station for the first time in 2012, and an emotive visual reminder of the one thing that unites us all—the planet.
Earth Hour Global co-Founder and CEO Andy Ridley says this year’s video reflects how “I Will If You Will” is the next step towards an interconnected global community, sharing the opportunities and challenges of a sustainable future.
“The video illustrates how every individual can become the inspiration to their own family, friends, peers and the world by sharing what they're willing to do to save the planet,” he says.
Creative director of the Earth Hour 2013 video, Tim Dyroff of Resolution™, added that working directly with clients like Earth Hour is a very satisfying process.
“We work together to make the presentation as exciting and relevant to as wide an audience as possible. There are no rights and wrongs in this kind of work, and it’s really about collaboration and listening that gets good work like this out the door,” he says.
“I am determined to involve our business in campaigns that promote change for the better, and Earth Hour fits the bill perfectly.”
In 2012, Earth Hour’s digital footprint more than doubled from 91 million in 2011, reaching more than 200 million people across various online platforms around the world.
Earth Hour 2013 will take place from 8.30 - 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, March 23.
Visit EcoWatch’s CLIMATE CHANGE and ENERGY page for more related news on this topic.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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